What Could Go Wrong?

What does this rule change mean for you? In short, domestic law enforcement officials now have access to huge troves of American communications, obtained without warrants, that they can use to put people in cages. FBI agents don’t need to have any “national security” related reason to plug your name, email address, phone number, or other “selector” into the NSA’s gargantuan data trove. They can simply poke around in your private information in the course of totally routine investigations.

In addition to the civil rights abuses pondered at the link, let me raise a National Security concern: you'll be giving a vast number of people access to this information, which means its parameters and limits will become widely known very quickly. The tool will rapidly become useless for what it was originally intended to do.